The people who say they need 3 cups of black coffee to start their day are just addicts with a high tolerance that experience mild withdrawal symptoms each morning.
If you feel like that, it’s your body crying for you to take a break.
If you like an occasional cup of coffee or energy drink to get through something, then that’s fine. But if you ever feel like one isn’t working like it used to, you should take a break from caffeine to reset your tolerance, not up the dosage like an addict.
Give this a listen
And also maybe get off your high horse while you’re at it.
I don’t care
The people who try to compare caffeine to a drug are both trying to make a mute point and have likely never done any real drugs that are truly addictive.
Yeah under the strict technical definition a drug is something you ingest that affects your body on some level. Yes caffeine is technically a drug under this definition as its a stimulant which represses the chemical signals in your brain responsible for tiredness.
Billions of people drink multiple cups a day, and some feel like they would really like some coffee in the morning. If you want to define that minor desire for coffee as an ‘addict craving’ well I guess nobody is stopping you from seeing it that way. So there, if you want to play the technicality game and do some mental gymnastics with your world view then I guess all frequent coffee drinkers are technially addicts to the most commonly used drug in the world.
Buuuut, heres where reality comes in. On the grand scale of all drugs that exist in the world today and their level of addictiveness/potential to destroy your life caffine is so so so far off the left side of the scale it may as not be there.
When we have a serious big boy conversation about drugs and their potential harms with people who actually know what they are talking about and lived that life, nobody is going to bring up caffeine.
I’ve worked in rehabs. Ive seen first hand what true addiction and harmful drugs can do to people. I’ve had friends whos lives/minds were destroyed by real hard opioids and narcotics. I’ve helped homeless strangers try to build up their lives from scratch. A vast majority of them had issues with alcohol and opioids, you want to know the demographic of affine addicts we treated? None.
You want to consider caffeine as a drug and point out how ‘lots of people are technically an addict lol’ fine fair enough. Just keep in mind that real truly hard drugs exist which caffeine can’t hold a candle too, that severe addiction is real and infinitely more hellish than coffee cravings in the morning. And maybe by trying to compare the two and think of them on the same level is an unnuanced overly simplified opinion
What? As a neuroscientist: caffeine is not “technically a drug” it is a drug. And yes, people are absolutely addicted to it. That “craving” you’re talking about is withdrawal and it’s real. Doesn’t matter if “billions*” drink it every day. It’s no mental gymnastics to say that there are millions if not billions of coffee addicts. Addict is not a defined term in the psych/neuro field so I would argue that that many people who would go through withdrawal without it are all addicted.
Wtf does it matter what other drugs are out there? Not everything is a competition. Current dependence on caffeine in our society is absolutely a problem as a result of too much stress and work pressure on everyone. Caffeine is not a cure to that.
Tl;dr: Yes caffeine is objectively a drug and yes very many people are addicted to it.
*Citation needed
I mean y’all are both right, no? Caffeine is a drug but its addictive nature is nothing compared to other drugs.
The secondary point, as mentioned, is “who said anything about comparative addictiveness?” Is heroin not bad because it isn’t as addictive as meth*? How is that relevant to the point that coffee can be addictive? Saying “claiming coffee is addictive just shows you’ve never been on hard narcotics” is at the level of an ad hominem, as if their point is invalidated by their sobriety.
*I have no idea the relative addictiveness of either (or really any drugs)
James Hoffman has a great video about this with scientific analysis to prove it. Basically the people that claim they’re “coffee addicts” are often drinking something that isn’t caffeinated like one might expect. A good pour over has close to 80mg of caffeine in it, but a weaker Starbucks/gas station/K-cup/instant coffee has only 25-45~mg of caffeine per cup. You effectively need 3 cups a day to equate what you can get from 1 perfectly good quality cup of coffee. Even a Starbucks “double shot” is like drinking 7/8ths of a proper pour over. I have a lot of friends that are “coffee addicts” and drink 2-3 Starbucks a day.
Espresso has less caffeine than large mug of drip coffee especially of morning light or medium roasts. And many coffee makers just make twice more water in double shot, not twice more coffee.
James Hoffman really is the endgame of coffee nerds. I love his stuff.
He does the thing I enjoy seeing most. It’s not just enough to drink coffee. We have to know about it from top-to-bottom. How to pull from it everything we can. His science the shit out of it is one of my favorite things. If you like his sort of “honed” approach to something and you like details like him I’d recommend AmmoNYC for car detailing. He’s like the James Hoffman of car cleaning. It’s not just enough to do something, but to tear it down and figure out how to do the process better with science and perfect it.
I’ve had a few of Ammo’s kids pop up in my recommendations, they’ve been great too.
And yeah, that’s the main reason I love coffee as much as I do. There’s so much to learn about it, so many ways you can tweak things. It’s fun.
Great recommendation - checking out his content now! I’ve been meaning to start detailing my car better
Eh, I don’t think the two things have to be tied. I consider myself a coffee person, however I also typically have only one cup of coffee a day (and some days not at all.) I don’t drink caffeine habitually otherwise, with perhaps one soda a week, or maybe a pot of tea on occasion (which is sometimes caffeinated) when I’m in a cozy mood.
But that one cup in the morning is important to me because I love the taste and smell of coffee. It’s part of my morning routine and I enjoy it. If something happens and I get distracted and don’t have that cup it’s not the end of the world, and I only usually notice when I end work for the day and go to clean my desk off and the cup isn’t there. For me it’s not a caffeine addiction so much as a morning treat. To be honest if they made a decaf version of my favorite coffee I’d buy that instead - I’m just here for the flavor :)
I quit caffeine in 2001.
I was addicted.
My family noticed that I read very angry and difficult to be around in Saturday mornings. I got really bad headaches.
Eh, I’m fine with my addictions. Life is too long as is and I only get one, I’m not gonna spend my time here avoiding things that taste good and make me feel good.
Pfft, coffee. That’s why Marduk gave us meth amphetamine.
Wait, that was Marduk? Morgan Håkansson? Damn, I knew he was a good guitarist and blasphemer, but I didn’t know he was also a chemist.
I am neutral on coffee itself but “coffee culture” can be pretty obnoxious. All the shopworn dad jokes about it, the impervious entitlement about needing coffee in the same way people need air to live. The highly specific prep and snobby opinions on types of drinks and how they’re made. It all gets very old, very fast IMO.
The Decoder Ring podcast did an interesting episode recently on how all coffee shops are exactly alike, all over the world. It was eye opening for me.
You know you have a good post here when people are immediately hostile to you. And people who are replying specifically to tell you that they don’t care about your opinion, who clearly haven’t had their morning coffee.
As someone who just gets sweaty when they drink coffee, I don’t begrudge people who get a kick out of it. But there are too many people who make their caffeine addiction a part of their personality.
Specially egregious on the programmer sphere.
I often make jokes about it, but in reality, if I drink more than a cup of it in a day I start physically vibrating.
tell that to the Salt Lake City office 😭
People don’t mean they literally cannot function without having coffee first thing in the morning. It’s just a clishé they say. Drinking coffee in the morning and after lunch is a habit rather than addiction. I don’t drink coffee because I need the energy boost it gives me because it doesn’t. I drink coffee because I like drinking coffee. It’s a moment of relaxation. At worst it’s a habitual addiction rather than a physical one. Also it’s not even particularly bad for you. Some might even say it’s healthy. Within reason ofcourse.
I used to drink two cups of coffee a day, and I did get addicted in that I had headaches when I stopped doing it. (I ran out of beans, and I didn’t bother to buy more. I didn’t know what was causing my headaches until I drank more coffee.)
That being said, it’s not really that bad of an addiction. Like anything there is a point where it gets bad for you. If it makes you behave in a way that’s hostile or mean to other people, that’s definitely an issue. If it gives you withdrawals, it might be worth it to change your habits. You can happily drink it every day if that works for your mind/body. If you’re like me, you’ll develop some dependence on it, but it’s not that big of a deal. It didn’t take long for me to start having it less often without the headaches.
TL;DR: You can be honest with yourself and moderate how much you enjoy caffeine. There’s no reason to get judgmental about other people.
Cliché, possibly 🙃
Just three? Pfft, lightweights.
We know. We don’t care.
Very much a coffee person here, but more quality oriented than quantity oriented. I drink two cups every day, sometimes three, but only if it is good. I’d much rather drink no coffee than bad coffee. And I’m véry particular about what I call good coffee.
